Saturday, August 22, 2015

I announced the development of Ravi back in January 2015. It started as an experiment - I was not certain whether Ravi could achieve the performance levels of LuaJIT, the reigning monarch for Lua JIT compilation.

I am pleased to report that Ravi is able to match LuaJIT's performance for a few selected benchmarks. More details are available here. While this is positive news, there is still much to do to make Ravi competitive in a variety of situations.

LuaJIT offers a powerful FFI interface for interfacing with external libraries and like. This is very convenient for sure, but the approach taken is not compatible with Lua. After some thought I decided that rather than creating an FFI interface for Ravi, a more general capability would be to allow both Lua and Ravi users to write JIT code using LLVM. Work on this has just started so there is not much to show yet, but I hope to make progress fairly quickly.

LLVM is a very low level api - lower level than C. This has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side the LLVM binding will allow Lua and Ravi users to exploit the full power of LLVM. On the minus side even writing trivial functions can be quite some effort.